by Tony Bennett
Hooking up with Ralph was one of the best career moves I’ve ever made. No one understands me more than he does, and we’ve become as close as brothers. Ralph is my idea of the perfect accompanist. He’s a beautiful musician, and even more than most great players, he really knows how to perform with a singer or a soloist. He doesn’t show off like a lot of other guys, playing lots of extra notes or fancy runs. After all, it’s the emotion behind the music that’s important. It takes a special person to support a performer and make him look good. I like to communicate the song simply by telling the story. Count Basie played that way, and that’s why what he did worked so well. Ralph has that same gift.
Ralph’s mother was an American who married an Englishman and settled in London. He was born and raised there, but in the early fifties he moved to America to pursue his musical career. He’d played gigs around London during and after the war, including little clubs where both Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli (Europe’s most famous jazzmen of the time) informally sat in. Ralph’s talent was impossible to miss. He’s the only musician I know who started at the top: when he was just twenty years old, Ralph’s first big-time professional gig was as the original pianist with Ted Heath and His Music, England’s leading jazz big band. He stayed with Heath for two years, recording and broadcasting for the BBC.
Ralph left Heath to play with a small band led by clarinet player Frank Weir, a rather special position to be in, because the great pianist George Shearing was also in that group, only he was playing accordion at the time. Ralph is virtually the only piano player in the world who can boast that he played piano for George Shearing! In 1949 Ralph began recording as a bandleader in his own right, doing sessions for some British labels. For several years, he was voted the most outstanding jazz pianist in Britain by the readers of Melody Maker, the Down Beat of England, and he played at their all-star recording sessions.
By 1953 Ralph had decided to try to make it in the country that invented jazz and came to New York City. He made a series of albums with such major American stars as Howard McGhee, Teddy Charles, Kenny Clarke, Charles Mingus, J. R. Monterose, Milt Hinton, and Jo Jones. Ralph’s album of original compositions, Around the World in Jazz, featuring Eddie Costa, Lucky Thompson, and Oscar Pettiford, was recorded in January 1957, just a few months before he joined me.
During my first recording session with Ralph I was practically forced to record what is probably my least favorite hit song, “In the Middle of an Island,” and he had the pleasure, such as it was, of witnessing my worst disagreement ever with Mitch Miller. As I’ve said, if Mitch brought me a song I really didn’t like, I’d simply refuse to do it. He’d keep pushing me, and I’d keep turning him down, until one of us relented. But in the case of “In the Middle of an Island,” neither one of us would let up. He was absolutely determined that I record it, and I was equally determined not to go anywhere near that terrible song.
Mitch had worked up a big arrangement with a vocal group and four guitars. He said, “You should show the world what a varied palette you have. It’s only going to be one side of a single. Am I going to have you put out a bad record?” I didn’t answer that.
Mitch didn’t let up on me, and everybody was standing around waiting for me to do something. It was still early in my career, I was still an amateur, and I hadn’t gotten over the fear that I might be dropped from the label, so I began to sing the song halfheartedly. I suddenly developed a throat problem, and said I couldn’t complete a take. But Mitch wasn’t buying any of it. He told me, “Come on, just give me one take all the way through and we can all go home.” So I thought, “The hell with it!” I took off my jacket and tied it around my waist like a grass skirt, started doing a hula dance, and managed to get through one take. That’s all I would do. To my great annoyance it actually got in the top ten. But I’ve never received one request for that song in all the years I’ve been performing since.
That was the last time I sang something I really couldn’t stand. Mitch was gradually phased out of A&R, and fortunately none of my other producers were as aggressive as Mitch in pressuring me to go against my own judgment, but they still tried. All through the sixties Columbia gave me a hard time. Even Goddard Lieberson, as high-minded as he was (this is the person who recorded John Gielgud’s The Ages of Man), started in on me. I went to a big board meeting with Goddard and the rest of the top brass, and they were trying to put me in a certain musical pocket, one I didn’t want to be in. Goddard and Mitch were emphatic, telling me, “We know what’s best for you; we know what you should do,” and so on and so forth. I answered them very calmly. I said, “I have just two words for you: ‘Frank Sinatra.’” It broke them all up. By 1957, Sinatra was again the biggest thing in show business, and Columbia had let him leave.
Meanwhile Ralph was encouraging my jazz inclinations. He took a look at my whole repertoire up to that point and saw that Columbia was trying to put me in a certain commercial niche by having me record one ballad after another. He thought I needed to diversify. He told me, “You can have six hits in a row, but if you keep doing the same thing over and over, the public will eventually stop buying your records.” I always had some swinging numbers in my act, and now with Ralph on piano, Billy Exiner on drums, and Don Payne on bass, I was doing a lot of numbers with the trio. Mitch Miller claimed that every time I got a hit single I wanted to sing jazz. Well, I figured that every time I did one for Columbia, I was entitled to do one for myself Cloud 7 came after my hits “Rags to Riches” and “Stranger in Paradise.” Ralph said I should always do the unexpected to survive and to remain interesting to my fans. Once “In the Middle of an Island” made it onto the charts I felt free enough to start work on Beat of My Heart, the most ambitious jazz project of my career.
Ralph and I wanted to make a jazz statement in a big way, and I came up with the idea of recording an album of standards that put the spotlight on different kinds of rhythm by using all the great jazz drummers I could find. We talked the concept over during our first few months on the road, and gradually it all came together. The first recording date was in June 1957, with Chico Hamilton. I was delighted with the results, particularly with the tongue-twisting, super-percussive title track, “The Beat of My Heart.” Mitch came to the first recording date, but was unusually quiet. Maybe he hoped he was giving us enough rope to hang ourselves. But when the album came out, an army of jazz fans said, Hey, this guy knows how to swing. A whole new audience accepted me—in fact, I still get my biggest reactions at jazz festivals the world over.
Between the June and October recording sessions for Beat of My Heart, I decided to try my hand at acting in the Kansas City production of Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings. I was still gigging around the country, of course, and my live shows were going great, but I wanted to do something a little different. I hadn’t been in a “show” since I starred in On the Town back in Germany in 1946! I had a great time. Later that year I starred in the Chicago production of Guys and Dolls. It was a great experience. The show was well done, took off right away, and was sold out for a month. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of playing Sky Masterson instead of Nathan Detroit. The reviewer’s headline read “Tony Bennett, The Wrong Sky.” If I had played Nathan Detroit, I could have made it work—his dialogue had much more humor in it.
Guys and Dolls was done in the theater-in-the-round format. Patricia brought Danny and Dae to see one of the performances, and they were fascinated with how it all worked. As the actors entered and left the stage, wed have to carry all the props and scenery on and off with us; it was wonderful to watch how the stage manager organized the chaos. When we got back home, the boys put on their own play using the same concept, with sets and costumes they’d built out of cardboard. It was quite elaborate, especially considering they were only three and four years old. It was one of the first indications I had that Danny was interested in show business and stagecraft.
When I got back to New York, we did three more recording sessions in October, and t
hat more than finished the Beat of My Heart album. For our first October session we had trumpeter Nat Adderley, Al Cohn on tenor, and Art Blakey as featured drummer. For the next date, Ralph indulged his passion for writing for trombones, and we had four, led by the wonderful Kai Winding, who flew in from Chicago for the occasion. We were also lucky enough to get Jo Jones, Count Basie’s greatest drummer. The last date featured my regular percussionist Billy Exiner; two giants of Latin American rhythm, Sabu and Candido; and Ralph brought in five flautists led by Herbie Mann. Not too shabby! The album was released in November and went over well with the critics and the jazz public.
When I played the Copacabana again in February 1958, I brought Herbie Mann, Sabu, and Candido along with me. I put cards on all the tables that read, “It’s great to be appearing at the famous Copa again. This time I’m being abetted by some wonderful musicians I thought you might like to meet.” And then I listed all the guys. We went over so well at the Copa that I took Candido on the road with me, playing the Chez Paree in Chicago, the Town and Country in Brooklyn, and the El Morocco in Montreal.
After the success of Tony and Beat of My Heart, I was finally allowed to make albums regularly, even though the vibe at Columbia was that I was wasting my time if I put my energies into anything but hit singles. I followed Beat of My Heart with a more conventional pop vocal album called Long Ago and Far Away. That was the first of three albums of lovely standards I did with arranger Frank DeVol. Frank was a great guy and a fine orchestrator. The album is a nice mixture of slow ballads, with a few slightly jazzy numbers thrown in, like “So Far,” which ends the album with a beat. Those sessions with Frank yielded a couple of hit singles, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” which I sang on Hugh Hefner’s TV show Playboy’s Penthouse, and “Till,” another big hit for me on the English charts.
It was always my dream to perform with Count Basie and Duke Ellington, the greatest bandleaders of all time. I was particularly keen to do an album with Count Basie, and in 1958 I got my chance to make not only one album with him, but two. No star singer had ever recorded an entire album with Basie before, and Basie was all for doing an album with me, but we had to contend with his record label, Roulette Records, and Morris Levy, who ran it. Levy was a classic ruffian who wheeled and dealed any way he could. He was notorious for scamming artists, and unfortunately Bill Basie was a gambler who ended up borrowing a lot of money from Levy. In the typical “owing your soul to the company store” scenario, it was rumored that after a while Basie was simply put on the payroll, like the rest of his band, and never got a cent of the royalties from his compositions or recordings.
Morris Levy agreed to my recording with Basie for Columbia as long as we agreed to make a reciprocal record for Roulette. Basie and I decided that we’d record the Columbia album live and the Roulette album in the studio. But getting Mitch Miller to approve this was another story.
He was totally opposed both to my working with Basie and to my appearing on Roulette Records. He said, “No way. What do you want to be on a junk label like Roulette for?” Mitch’s own career as a recording artist was starting to take off around this time. He had a hit single with “The Yellow Rose of Texas” that was steadily climbing the charts, so I decided to bide my time and wait for the record to reach the top. I got Mitch’s approval the day his song hit number one. Mitch told me that if I made this record, it would ruin my career, but he was feeling so great about reaching number one with “Yellow Rose,” he finally gave in.
We decided to do the live album for Columbia first, and worked out the details with the Latin Casino in Philadelphia. Ralph orchestrated and arranged the entire album. Although I’d talked with him on the telephone I didn’t meet Count Basie until our rehearsals began. It was an amazing experience, the fulfillment of a dream, and I’ll never forget it. We hit it off right away, as though we always knew and understood each other. At one point Basie turned to his band, pointed at me, and said, “Anything this man wants, he gets!” I was floored.
We opened at the Latin Casino in Philadelphia on November 28, 1958, and did tremendous business. There was barely room in that tiny club for Frank Laico to set up his console, and he finally had to rig it up in the basement kitchen. I thought the recording came out wonderfully, but stereo recording had just been discovered and Al Ham, the producer, was unhappy that we had recorded in mono. It was his call, so the following month, we rerecorded the album in the studio in stereo, adding the crowd noise and applause to make it sound “live.” But of all things, Ham put the audience applause in the wrong places. What a mess! We titled the album In Person! and released it in early 1959. I never understood why we didn’t release the live version. The whole attempt at fabricating an audience was in bad taste. As a result I’ve always been partial to the second album, the one we recorded for Roulette. It was originally released in 1961 as Count Basie/Tony Bennett: Strike Up the Band, but Levy was such an opportunist that over the years he licensed the recording to anyone he could, and as a result the album appeared under an endless number of titles, including Basie Swings Bennett Sings.
Those two albums were the beginning of a beautiful personal and musical relationship with the Count. Over the next twenty-five years we worked together many times and hung out together whenever we got the chance. I’d gotten in the habit of bringing home my musician friends at all hours of the night, and Patricia got used to expecting the unexpected. One night she woke up and wandered into the living room in her nightgown, where she saw not only Bill Basie himself but all sixteen members of his band sitting around jamming. Not your usual domestic scene!
We once played the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, and our combined act was so hot the audience went absolutely crazy. We got ten standing ovations—it was phenomenal. After the show Basie and I were standing in the parking lot and a white guy came up to Basie, threw him a set of keys, and said, “Hey, buddy, get me my car, will ya?” He thought Basie was a parking attendant! The Count replied, “Get your own car; I’m tired. I’ve been parking them all night.” Basie always had a great sense of humor, and working with him was truly one of the highlights of my life.
Beat of My Heart and my two records with Count Basie earned me a whole new audience: true jazz fans. Jazz critics question my validity as a jazz artist, and I don’t label myself as one. But personally I love jazz more than any other form of music. It’s spontaneous, honest, and natural. Every civilization is known by It’s culture, and jazz is America’s greatest contribution to the world, and I’ve always surrounded myself with jazz performers because they understand that the moment is the most important thing: they improvise, they reinvent the music every night. I know how to improvise too. I sing in the tradition of Bing Crosby: if I like a song, I sing it, and I never sing a song the same way twice.
My most vivid memories from the late fifties are the great years I spent in Chicago. Those were tremendous days. My favorite Chicago hangout was the Black Orchid. It was owned by Paul Raffles, and it was the hippest place in town. He hired singers and brilliant comics like Larry Storch and Jack E. Leonard, there was a chorus line of scantily clad girls, and he always had a great piano player like Ace Harris in the lounge. When the show was over, we’d go to Paul’s apartment and jam until morning.
I met Hugh Hefner around this time. He was on the scene, just getting started with Playboy. He liked to hang out at the Black Orchid, and though he was basically a shy, introverted guy, he knew a good thing when he saw it. His plan was to take all the fun we were having in Chicago in those days and mass-produce it in his magazine, in his clubs, and on his TV show. He refined his idea into a million-dollar concept that’s still going strong today. I got to know Hugh during those nights at the Black Orchid, and I was a guest on his TV shows, Playboy’s Penthouse and Playboy After Hours.
One night after my show at the Chez Paree I was hanging out with the guys in the band. Suddenly there was a banging on the front door of the club and some guy yelled, “Open up! FBI!”
Two ag
ents muscled their way into the club, lined us up against the wall, and frisked us, but there was nothing to be found. We were really shaken up and figured the incident would hit the papers the next day.
The next night, we were at a party at Hef’s place when in walked Lenny Bruce with his arms around those two “FBI agents.” The whole thing was a joke! Lenny wanted to get us, and he did.
When I think back to my days in Chicago, I can’t help but remember my great friend, the miraculous piano wizard Erroll Garner. The Chez Paree had a joint within a joint, a little piano room in the back called the Key Club, where Erroll would play until all hours. He loved playing the piano so much that even after the regular audience went home, he kept playing for the bosses, the entertainers, and the chorus girls.
We often met in his studio at Carnegie Hall and jammed for hours, and sometimes we hooked up when we were on the road. One time he told me he thought I should open my show with the song “When You’re Smilin’.” I told Erroll that everybody opens with that song, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer, I didn’t give in, though, because I felt sure the song was overdone, so I turned his request down. At the same time, I heard everybody raving about Judy Garland’s new live album from Carnegie Hall. I bought the record. It starts with an exciting announcement, “Ladies and Gentlemen, Judy Garland...” There are deafening cheers and Judy begins singing, in ballad tempo, “When You’re Smilin...” Once again I learned my lesson.
Erroll was a great musician, and his classic album Concert by the Sea showed Columbia just how well a jazz album could do. Before then everybody thought 75,000 was a good figure for a pop (let alone jazz) album to sell. But Concert by the Sea sold 250,000 copies. That was an astonishing figure for a jazz album, and it helped Columbia reach a whole new legion of fans.